20 Best Movie Deaths Of The Decade
For whom the movie bells tolled...
A good movie death means different things to different people. You're either looking for badass, fatal set-pieces (in which case, go and watch the Saw movies again) or something that is emotionally resonant, but there's a lot besides and between those ones as well. Mortal greatness can be linked to inventiveness, impact on the plot, shock factor, ridiculousness or just comedy value or it can be something that sticks with you long after the credits roll for another reason.
Considering all of those definitive pillars that can make for brilliance, looking back over the last decade of movies provides a huge number of major deaths. After all, death in Hollywood is still one of the most valuable currencies. It's how we're told that the stakes are high, it's how we're sold threat and it's how the wind is punched out of us. And since we're all obsessed with the idea of our own deaths, it makes a lot of sense that the obsession would carry over.
But which were the best movies deaths of the decade and why did they leave such a mark?
Naturally, there are some serious spoilers in here. Read on at your own peril, basically.
20. The Super Cops - The Other Guys (2010)
Let's start with a light-hearted one. Yep, death can be light-hearted.
The Other Guys took aim at the usual cop movie tropes espoused in the work of the likes of Shane Black, presenting the idea of two absolutely terrible heroes - a loose cannon (Mark Wahlberg) and a desk jockey (Will Ferrell) - and put them in the firing line. It's essentially the tale of what happens if the guys in the background of the normal cop movies were the ones left to save the day.
And the way that mix-up happens comes courtesy of one of the funniest moments in the movie and one of the funniest movie deaths of all time aa the real heroes - the super cops played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson - start to believe the smell of their own hype and believe their heroic immortality. Believing themselves cooler than gravity, they leap off a roof at the climax of their supposedly world-saving mission, only to die from their injuries like any normal person would.